Exams
Here is where you can ask questions about exams ... or offer other people some useful advice and tips about how you have coped with them in the past ... Exam Tips Here are a few useful tips: 1. Revise all your lecture/seminar notes for SA452 - you will need to know the basic general content of all topics. (This is important because material from one lecture can also be relevant when responding to other lecture topics - you should not separate topics off from each other too much). 2. Having said that, you should then choose a much smaller number of particular topics for detailed revision - to specialise for you exam answers (I'd say say 5 or 6 of these is a good number, you can never predict exactly which topics will come up). Those you presented on in seminars would be good ones to include. Use your lecture notes, your seminar notes and notes you made during the year on your readings. Boil them down to the basics - including a few handy statistics, a quote, and perhaps two opposing points of view you can use in an essay on each topic ... 3. It is a good idea to practice writing some timed mock exam essays at home - use an alarm clock to get a sense of what one hour feels like when you write. Practice writing an exam answer from a past paper on one or two of your chosen topics. This will also gradually help you speed up your handwriting skills. If you want, I will take a look if you bring practice essays to office hour. 4. Exam essays are just like mini versions of 'normal essays' - answer the question, refer to the readings whenever possible, give examples ... but obviously we require less detail, and you should not worry if you forget details, the 'big picture' is really the important thing. 5. The golden rule is: make sure you give equal time to each question. If you run out of time and fail to answer one of the questions, that is a disaster because you could fail. Remember it is much easier to get the first 50 marks of an essay than the second 50, so if you are short of time a basic answer to a question is much better than two that are near-perfect and one that you had no time to write! 6. Remember that SA452 has a compulsory question 1 on general social policy ideas and concepts - so make sure you know lectures 1-2 particularly well. --David Lewis 09:46, March 30, 2010 (UTC) Questions Preparing 5-6 topics would means 5-6 separate lectures.. so that should ideally prepare us for 5-6 questions if all those topics came. But can there be cross-cutting questions. Say a question that combines Livelihoods approach and PRSPs. That would mean that 6 topics might actually just prepare us for 3 question (that too if we are lucky and did the right combinations). Ashima.goyal 11:17, April 2, 2010 (UTC) On the core course, yes, there might be one or two questions that are 'cross cutting'. So you must know the basics for each of the full range of topics for the full 20 weeks I'm afraid. Then you choose your 5-6 to specialise on in detail. Or 4-5, or 3-4 ... You basically need to use your judgment. That means that if your best topic comes up, but is mixed with one you don't know so well, you can at least have a good go at answering it ... But don't stress about this, you'll find that questions are reasonably predictable. The key is to know the general course material, plus a few topics in detail. --David Lewis 12:13, April 2, 2010 (UTC) The write up at the beginning of the page is very useful! Thanks for that Professor Lewis. [ no problem!--David Lewis 17:14, May 1, 2010 (UTC) !!!] I was wondering whether it is advisable to do 5-6 topics other than topics 1-2 which usually forms the basis of the compulsory question? And what is the desired word count for each question in the exam? lastly, are we supposed to quote authors, year of publishing, names of books while answering questions? I know the questions must be sounding really naive, but the exams here seem to be very different from what I gave back home! 10:25, April 22, 2010 (UTC)Rakshita Thanks for asking these questions, Rakshita - and for using the Wiki. I'm sure many people have similar questions (and they are not at all naive, so it is good to have the opportunity to try to answer them. 1. How many topics you decide to revise really depends on your attitude to risk. I can't make that decision for you, I'm afraid. In addition to lectures 1-3, you need to know at least two other topics very well. You can't predict these, so more than two is essential ... so if you can live with risk, do 3-4, if not, do 5-6. Also, what constitutes a topic exactly? I'd say that lectures 1- 2 are really one topic: 'what is social policy?'. 2. There is no word count for exam essays, but I suggest you should aim to write around 1500 words for each one. 3. You definitely need to quote authors by name in exam essays (they are in large part a test of your reading), but we don't expect you to have dates and page numbers ... I hope this helps --David Lewis 10:36, April 22, 2010 (UTC) Another clarification. Lecture 3 is actually 'approaches to poverty'. So isn't that a different topic from 'what is social policy'. Don't only lecture 1-2 constitute the topic 'what is social policy'? Ashima.goyal 10:34, April 25, 2010 (UTC) Yes, good point. Lectures and 1 and 2 are the core, but do take a look across other relevant lectures such as lecture 3 for general 'what is social policy' type points that you might be able to use for Question 1. Remember, no topic is 100% hermetically sealed! --David Lewis 17:14, May 1, 2010 (UTC) Ditto Ashima! Also, would it be alright if we practice writing an exam answer for one of the seminar questions (for this year) and hand it over to you for feedback? Or can we get feedback only for exam/seminar questions for last year? Rakshita23 14:36, April 27, 2010 (UTC)Rakshita You can get feedback on any practices essay answers you write if you bring them to office hour, that's fine! --David Lewis 17:14, May 1, 2010 (UTC)